Until recently, work on biological clocks that dictate daily fluctuations in most body functions, including core body temperature and alertness, focused on neurons, those electrically excitable cells that are the divas of the central nervous system. Asked to define the body’s master clock, biologists would say it is the suprachiasmatic nuclei, or SCN – in the brain that consist of 20,000 neurons...
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The difference between an old brain and a young brain isn’t so much the number of neurons but the presence and function of supporting cells, glia. Researchers who examined postmortem brain samples from 480 individuals ranging in age from 16 to 106 found that the state of someone’s glia is so consistent through the years that it can be used to predict someone’s age. The work lays the foundation to better understand glia’s role in late-in-life brain disease.
“We extensively characterized aging-altered gene expression changes across 10 human brain regions and found that, in fact, glial cells experience bigger changes than neurons,” says Jernej Ule...
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